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Title: Fixed abodes Author: Anonymous Language: en Topics: anti-civ, history, Killing King Abacus, repression Source: Retrieved on April 6th, 2009 from http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus/MOVE.htm
Domestication and sedentization are not processes that were only imposed
on “primitive” peoples; these processes occurred in Europe as well.
Latin American nomads and European vagabonds experienced similar
repression but by different means. Missions and prisons served similar
functions: they settled the roamers and put them to work. Now, there are
many all too familiar ways to regulate or fix movement. Here in the US,
incarceration rates are skyrocketing. The computerization of biometrics
is a new weapon in the State’s arsenal that greatly increases the
accuracy with which they can identify human beings: this facilitates
incarceration and immigration control. The above technologies and
institutions of control share a common aim: to regulate movement and
direct human action into the repetitive rotation of production and
consumption.
Throughout Latin America during the colonial period Spanish style towns
and cities were built with a central plaza, church and municipal
building. American settlement patterns had been generally much more
dispersed than Spanish towns. The Colonial administration forcibly
concentrated dispersed settlements into such towns (reducciones). Once
in towns it was much easier for individuals to be reduced to subjects of
the crown and coerced into giving tribute.
The Missions settled, converted and hispanicized previously nomadic or
semi-nomadic groups. They also eliminated hunting and gathering in order
to enforce the production of a substantial agricultural surplus. (Hu de
Hart 1981: 36) This system destroyed the economic autonomy that was
based in hunting and gathering and attempted to instill the discipline
of daily work, so that residents would produce with less resistance. One
crucial aspect of this was the imposition of the time of the mission
bell and the Christian work week. Obviously profit cannot be maximized
if workers are left to work on their own time. The logic of productivity
needs to organize time as well as space.
Apache warfare and raiding were very successful and managed to repel
Spaniards from a 250 mile area, near the present day Mexico-US border.
The Colonial administration had still not gained control of this area in
1821, at the time of independence. The Spaniards simply could not
dominate the Apache militarily. Apaches were familiar with the area and
traveled on horseback, they often raided Spanish settlements and
disappeared without a trace. Colonial policies with regards to nomadic
and semi-nomadic people always made sedentization a priority for this
very reason. How could they control or exploit people that they can’t
even find?
After all else had failed, the Spanish administration lured some Apaches
into “Peace Establishments” (settlements near presidios) in 1786 by
simply promising them weekly rations. One interesting difference between
these settlements and Missions is that these settlements were a
financial loss to the crown, they did not manage to exploit residents
except when males were forced to serve militarily. That is, in this case
control was more important to them than exploitation. They resorted to
this method because Apaches simply would not submit to settling in
missions. Residents of these settlements were forbidden from traveling
beyond 30 miles from settlements unless authorized and were required to
carry passports in those cases. (Griffin 1988: 99) But this law was
often ignored and Apaches continued to travel where they wished. Apaches
were encouraged to use guns instead of bows and arrows so that they
would be dependent on the market for the acquisition of gun-powder, and
they were encouraged to use liquor for the same reason. These measures
were moderately successful for 25 years. But when rations started to
dwindle raiding increased and when the Mexicans ran out of rations in
1833, the situation returned to that of 1770 with as many Apaches
roaming and raiding as before the “Peace Establishments” were built.
(Worcester) In short, these measures failed, the nomadic Apache
continued to elude the Spanish. These Apaches fiercely resisted
domestication and refused to settle down permanently. Only later, Mexico
and the US finally forced to settle or exterminated them but this
achieved only after a long struggle.
Reducciones, Missions and ‘Peace Establishments” all put residents where
they were locatable so that they would be more easily exploitable. The
vagabonds of Europe were as much a threat to the powerful as the nomads
and semi-nomads of Latin America, they were therefore also submitted to
regimes of domestication. While the residents of Missions were converted
to Christianity while they were taught the discipline of daily labor,
European vagabonds were forced out of idleness while enclosed within
four walls.
During the early 1600s the first “houses of confinement” were built in
Europe, to still the wandering and to put the idle to work.
In 1607 an ordinance called the archers to the gates of Paris to shoot
at any vagabonds or beggars who dared try to enter the city. In 1656 the
Hopital General was created, this was more a prison than a hospital and
it was used to confine the idle, the vagabonds, beggars, sick and
insane. Its openly claimed aim was to prevent idleness. The edict of
1657 was a vagrancy law that was enforced by archers who herded people
into the Hospital. This is an interesting mutation of the 1607 policy
and an example of an increasing reliance on confinement. These changes
in punishment corresponded with an increasing social instability due to
a growth in unemployment and a decrease in wages. This instability
created an increased mobility of classes. In response to these changes
there were three large uprisings in Paris in the early 1600s and guilds
were formed in many trades. Obviously this new emphasis on confinement
did not disappear with the end of this particular economic crisis.
Confinement continued to be used as a source of cheap manpower after the
crisis. In subsequent periods of unemployment it was again used as a
weapon against social agitation and uprisings.
It is noteworthy that the first houses of confinement in England, France
and Germany were built in the most industrialized cities of those
countries. In England houses of confinement were opened in 1610 to
occupy the pensioners of certain mills and weaving and carding shops.
This was done during a recession, in other words, in a time where there
was a high risk of rebellion. Industrialization had a great impact on
class structure, it created new classes and thus allowed for individuals
to change class. It also created new particularly appalling working
conditions. As I have mentioned these drastic changes were, not
surprisingly, met with resistance and revolt. Confinement was either a
response to revolt or a means to prevent violent resistance to
industrialization and its results. The history of confinement and other
institutions or technologies of control is not a one-way linear process
of increasing repression but a series of jumps, a conflict ridden
complex of resistances and the state’s responses to resistance.
Identification is a key technology of control used to keep immigrants
out and supposed “criminals” locked in. Computerized biometrics are now
the most effective technologies of identification. Finger printing is an
older form of biometrics. The Human Genome Project is trying to map out
the genes of every citizen of Iceland and put this information into a
database. This leads us towards a world in which, according to the
system, the most valuable thing about the human body is the digital data
which it provides.
Biometrics are being used to restrict access to anything from a building
to the nation-state. It is useful to know what specific technologies
they are using against us. For example, Iris scanning is a very accurate
technology of identification but luckily it has its limitations. It is
less effective when used on people with very dark brown eyes. This is a
very fortunate coincidence in countries like the US and Britain with
racist cops! Retina scanning, on the other hand is said to be
infallible. “Counterfeit resistant” Laser ID cards are used by the US
INS for Green Cards and for the Department of State’s Border Crossing
Card. The EU is considering using this technology as well. Their spread
to Europe would be tragic news for illegal immigrants. Data (biological
and other wise) which is written onto the Laser Card’s optical memory
cannot be altered, therefore it is nearly impossible to forge this
technology. This technology is obviously a vast improvement over the
passports given to Apaches in the late 1700s, those passports were easy
to forge. However, it is fitting that the Apaches resisted this
technology not by forging it but by ignoring it and traveling beyond the
areas controlled by Spanish. Unfortunately there are now fewer deserts
to roam where such things can be ignored, but such places do still
exist. The combined use of these technologies and increased surveillance
(such as the millions of dollars budgeted for wiretapping in the 2000
Federal Budget) are of great benefit to the budding prison industrial
complex.
These technologies give those in power more effective means to keep
people in their designated place in the world of sanity: the measured,
disciplined, educated, treated, productive world that functions
according to the logics of capital and the state. There are always those
who escape, defy or resist these logics, this is precisely why the state
goes to such lengths to contain us. They are used in tracking systems
that give governments and companies the means to find people and put
them where they are ‘useful’ to the powerful, such as within the prison
industrial complex, or to exclude people from access to privileged
domains (gated communities, company buildings, rich countries etc.).
While restrictions on human movement are increasing, restrictions on the
movement of capital are diminishing. However, the free movement of
individuals has always been a threat to productivity; these new
technologies are merely a more efficient means to achieve the same
repressive goal. They are used to prevent us from acting on our desires
unless our desires have become perverted and trapped within the cycle of
production and consumption. Reducciones, missions, “Peace
Establishments” and confinement were and are all forms of
rationalization: they fix and contain human bodies
The free movement of individuals has always been a threat to
productivity, the willfully idle vagabond uses mobility to escape the
grind of work and the wandering worker can use mobility as an advantage
over his boss. The free movement through space is a threat to the state
because it threatens any control over space. Complete free movement
through space would not only threaten the nation-state but all private
property. Mobility is our power.
Mexico: Albuquerque.
Zulai Marcela Fuentes Ortega. Mexico City: 1995.